Sunday, July 31, 2011

Do a Reality Check

Greetings! This week I wanted to introduce two potential game mechanics that you could incorporate into your campaign.

The first mechanic is one that I call “Reality Checks.” Basically, this would be a way of determining the plausibility or possibility of an action within your D&D world. The way it would work is say your chaotic evil, half-ork barbarian (level 3) is milling around a town and sees a helpless beggar on the streets. The half-ork then says “Ok, I wanna take the beggar into an alley, tear him in half and eat him” (true story). This is where a reality check comes in. For a level 3 barbarian is this even possible in your world? So, the player would roll a d20 for his reality check of “is it possible for me to tear a beggar in half and eat him” (this example might require two checks actually, haha). The DM would have discretion as to what the DC would be, but in general a natural 20 means it’s possible (unless it’s some that is actually impossible like if the barbarian said he wanted to fly away but had no wings or spell to do so). In addition to this, if your DM really wanted to, he could allow you to put points into Reality, like a skill. That would be interesting to say the least.

The second mechanic is one that was actually suggested by one of Do A Spot Check’s readers, Shadow-Savant. The basic idea is that even if you are a lawful character you still are capable of doing somewhat chaotic actions and if you are a chaotic character you can still act lawfully (on occasion). So the way you decide your actions is you roll a percentile die to determine where your actions lie on lawful chaotic chart. It might look something like this for a lawful neutral character:

Lawful Neutral Chaotic

0% <---------------------------65%---------80%------->100%

To clarify, there is a 0-65% chance of acting lawfully, a 66-80% chance of acting neutral, and a 80-100% chance of acting chaotic. Now you can mess with these numbers however you want depending on the character. For instance, a Lawful good character of the Paladin brand might only have a 10% chance of chaotic action and a chaotic evil character might only have 5% chance of acting lawfully. You get the idea. Either way, I thought it was a fun concept and worthy of mentioning.

Until next week.

Raz

P.S. I realize that this is one of my shorter posts, but with the school year swiftly approaching I need to start making my posts shorter or else I won’t have the time to finish them during the year. Hopefully this doesn’t disappoint anyone, but it is better to have shorter posts, than no posts at all.